One Good Egg: An Illustrated Memoir (26 page)

Our love would always come first. Our time would be our own. Our late-night dinners, or no dinner at all. Our Sunday mornings. Our weekend getaways. Our spontaneous lunches or middle-of-the-night sky watches. We could be very content being the World’s Best Aunts.

The carpenter-handyman dropped off some drawings.
A rope swing? Poor, pitiful childless people.
We weren’t ready to give him a deposit yet.

The Monday after Christmas, I pulled out one last fertility stop.

I, contrary to my previous public pronouncements that meditation wasn’t my cup of tea (or maybe
was
, since I can’t stand tea, either), began meditating. It still wasn’t/was my cup of tea, but I had been persuaded that the benefits did not discriminate.

I signed up for a one-day Kundalini weight-loss workshop at the local nail salon. At the end of the day, I asked the instructor for a meditation. She didn’t have anything specific to fertility or conception, but she was confident the pregnancy and birth meditation, with a couple of tweaks, would work. I secretly meditated for eleven minutes (the suggested minimum) after Lorene and I turned the lights out each night.

J
OURNAL
: J
ANUARY
6, 2004

How did someone who can’t draw, has no sense of color or ability to fill a page, get to do a picture book? And the hormones haven’t even started
. . .

The Lupron injections started up. I got my period nine days later without any of my usual night-before hyperproductivity or day-of slight bloating—my body was on somebody else’s autopilot.

Since we tried not to plan our lives around my cycles,* the timing was invariably an issue. This year, however, we had lucked out with the Burlington getaway. I felt a twinge as I packed up the car; I allowed myself, for an instant, to wish I was packing up a baby, instead of arriving at the bed and breakfast empty-armed. My failure wouldn’t be lost on the owners, the ones who had sent us off with their best wishes that snowy Sunday a year earlier.

When we returned from the long weekend, the real cycle started. That week, I had to travel to New York and give myself the shots for the first time.

I could have continued to give myself the shots when I got home, but I preferred the small ceremony of Lorene’s and my 9:30 nightlies.

Dr. Franken did my retrieval this time. He had no memory of our first transfer, which was fine (I still had no memory of his real last name), and there was no need to bring up a sad ending when we could all focus on a happy beginning. He collected a very respectable fifteen eggs in his basket. I slept a full five hours afterward, and I was sorer than I remembered being the first time, but not enough to change our dinner plans.

The transfer was three days later, the same day my first bound copy of
I Had Brain Surgery, What’s Your Excuse?
was scheduled to land on my doorstep. Fourteen of the fifteen eggs fertilized, but only four developed into embryos.

Lorene didn’t sleep the night before. Her anxiety ratcheted way up after
ER
; the episode took place in the neonatal intensive care unit. She was anxious about having a baby, having twins, dropping the baby, forgetting the baby . . . I slept like a baby. Whatever will be, will be . . . over.
Just please not another ectopic pregnancy.

We met the transfer doctor in the pre-op chamber, a curtained-off cubicle. He was supposedly there to confirm our directives—a transfer of two embryos. Lorene let him know it was our last try.
No pressure.
He closed the curtain and sat down. “At your age”—he glanced at his chart—“forty-one and a half”—
correction, sir, a third
—“you really should consider four or five, given the fragmenting.”
Ow!
I felt that in my ovaries.

Lorene and I were not comfortable with the concept of “reduction,” a euphemism for aborting if we ended up with more than two. (I know, we hadn’t been comfortable with the concept of an IVF eight months earlier, and there we were.)

“The chance of one implantation, let alone two or three—let’s be realistic—is small.”
Why are we being realistic all of a sudden?

Lorene now had the doctor talking about his specialty in chromosomally transgendered kids.